The People Immortal - Vasily Grossman

 Years ago, I struggled to engage with Life and Fate.   Since then Grossman's wartime fiction has been fully translated as a trilogy, of which The People Immortal is the first and Stalingrad the third.  I wanted so much to try again and starting at the beginning, with the shortest of the novels, seemed to me ideal.

And it was.   I was gripped from the moment it began.   It is set - and was written - during Operation Barbarosa, the German invasion of their supposed ally in June 1941.   Grossman, despite having to use a walking stick at only 35, volunteered for service and was embedded as the front line correspondent for Red Star.   His articles and notes became material for this novel, written during a two-month leave of absence in April and May 1942.   The events depicted are fundamentally real but fictionalised.   Captain Babadjanian, for example, who inspires one of the two protagonists (Bogariov) was absolutely real.  Grossman shows him killed him in battle, which was what Grossman thought had happened.  In fact he wasn't dead and joked about the mistake when Grossman interviewed him in Berlin immediately after the war.

Commisar Bogariov and Semion Ignatiev are our two protagonists, the former an academic turned senior officer, Ignatiev a light=hearted peasant in Babadjanian's Rife Company.  I hadn't understood what a Commisar was in wartime.   I do now.   Bogariov is the political commander alongside and equal to the military commander.   In The People Immortal Bogariov lambasts Major Mertsalov, the regimental commander, for losing sight of the big picture - that it is the Soviet Union's destiny to smash fascism - thereby inspiring Mertsalov to take the radical, unexpected tactic which secures victory in the battle that is the climax of the novel.   Bogariov in turn takes inspiration from Ignatiev, who embraces his life knowing full well that it could end at any moment.   Ignatiev is not fighting for a political creed, he is defending the land he loves.

That brings us to the key point of the novel.   This is not a victory which sends the German army back where it came from.   It is a victory gained against the odds during a full scale retreat.   Russia is not winning overall.   It trying to rescue crumbs of comfort from a massive defeat.   Germany invaded on June 22; a week later they had taken Minsk and captured 300,000 Soviet troops.   By mid-September they are encircling Kiev having taken another half-a-million prisoners of war.

Grossman knows the Nazis are killing Jews and destroying communities.   He illustrates this in the novel with the story of Lionya, the son of a general, who is tries to walk to Moscow after fleeing the village where he lived with his grandmother.   For all Grossman's realism and light hand with the fictional gloss, we are genuinely moved when Lionya finds safety in the vast forest, and when our two protagonists emerge together from the carnage of battle.

Can I handle Life and Fate now?  It's surely worth a second try.   By the way, the translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler is brilliant.   I'm pretty sure Robert translated Life and Fate.   Must check...

The White People - Arthur Machen

 

Machen was an early master of weird fiction.   His tales are not necessarily horror but they are extremely weird.   I have reviewed 'The Great God Pan' earlier on this blog; 'The White People' is Machen's other masterpiece.

He swathes his narrative in layers.   Un unnamed third party introduces Cotgrave to the eccentric recluse Ambrose.   They have a nightlong discussion about the nature of sanctity and evil.   Ambrose maintains that sanctity is the quest to recover paradise as it was before the Fall, whereas evil is the quest to gain the status and powers of angels, which mankind never possessed.   By way of illustration Ambrose lends Cotgrave a green journal, the book of secrets kept by a sixteen year old girl whose name we never find out.

She tells her reader that this is just one of a series of books in which she has recorded all the secrets she learned from her nurse as a very young child and which she has explored and practiced in adolesence.   These include visions, tunnels leading to other, odd landscapes, nymphs and complex ritual dances.   The nurse was taught by her great-grandmother, who dated from a time when these things were widely known and commonly practiced in remote communities.

The girl - an only child, we assume, whose mother we know is dead and whose father is detached and seemingly uncaring - has built a world of her own.   Is this the sin Ambrose spoke of - or is it perhaps an act of sanctity?   What are the white people?   Are they otherworldly or are they nature spirits of some kind?   The narrative in the journal ends abruptly, inconclusively.   Cotgrave returns it to Ambrose and finds out what happened to the girl, which answers one question, whilst opening up dozens of others to which Machen, the master, provides no further clues.

If you read 'The White People' in search of horror you'll be disappointed.   Read it as weird fiction and you will be enthralled, intrigued, and quite possibly amazed.

FBI Story - The Gordons

 Just look at that cover!   The 1957 UK reprint of the US orginal from 1950.   Even the authors - 'The Gordons' - screams at us.   Turns out they were a married couple, Gordon Gordon (yup) and Mildred.   They wrote crime fiction as if it was true crime, heavy with facts and procedure, and the biggest surprise of all is, it works incredibly well.   Yes, hero John 'Rip' Ripley is a bit of a stereotype but the Gordons give him enough quirks to make him human - he keeps letting his girlfriend down on dates and he doesn't want to kill people, even psycopathic criminals.   And the gallery of villains in FBI Story are the real treats.

The central story is that an old lady has reported her adult daughter missing.   It's not a FBI case but Rip can't help but look into it.   He approaches her last known employer who tells him that Eugenie Martinek ran off with one of his cars.   Antoine Remarque is disappointed rather than annoyed.  He is super-rich and has other cars, but Miss Martinek is super attractive and he rather fancied developing their association.   Eugenie really wanted to be an actress.   She had been personal assistant to a star and seems to have become involved in a conspiracy to steal the star's jewels and replace them with high quality paste.  The paste man has now been murdered.   There are several suspects, including Eugenie and creepy fence Nick Steele, who may be in a relationship.

The criminals are well developed with both back stories and psychological insights.   Drugs are an issue, as are the aftershocks and disruptions caused by the war.   Are Eugenie's problems, for example, anything to do with her Croation heritage?   I have to admit, this is the first time I can recall mention of Croatia in a book from 1950.

Best of all, there is a fantastic shoot-out climax and an admirably brief epilogue.   State of the art, I would suggest, maybe even ahead of the game in its day.   Happily I have The Gordons' next book after FBI Story and will report back soon.   It's another fantastic title for a crime novel - Campaign Trail A Presidential Election Thriller.   Can't wait.   Almost certainly won't wait very long.

The Goodbye Coast - Joe Ide

 The Goodbye Coast sells itself as 'A Philip Marlowe novel', which it isn't.   We shall come to that.   But it was the reason I picked it up because as previously stated on this blog, I not only love the original but I also loved several of the 'continuation' novels, particularly those by Denise Mina and Lawrence Osborne.

ide goes further, giving us a Marlowe transplanted to 21sr Century LA, still around forty years old with a strong personal code of ethics.   This isn't sci fi.   It's just a private investigator born circa 1980 who happens to be called, for no apparent reason, Philip Marlowe.   There is no irony involved; no one says 'I liked you better in The High Window.   In fact this Marlowe is a lot closer to Jim Rockford of the epoymous Files, with a pesky but loveable father played, in an ideal world, by Noah Beery Junior.   I for one had James Garner in my mind's eye throughout.

I have no idea why Ide went for this idea.   What we have in The Goodbye Coast is an excellent contemporary crime novel about movie second raters and Russian/Armenian gangsters.   At the centre is a 17-year-old wild child, Cody, daughter of Malibu movie people, whose father has just been shot in the face.   Marlowe is hired to get the runaway back (the reason why, when revealed, is a very nice touch).   He finds her and in so doing saves her from an assassination attempt.   So he takes her into his form of protective custody, lodging her with his father Emmet, an LAPD detective on indeteminate leave until he gets his drink problem under control.

There's also an excellent subplot, which like all great B stories inverts the A.   A mature but hot English lady comes to LA to find her young son who has been abducted by her feckless rich-kid-movie-wannabe ex.   The two investigations overlap and all Hell breaks loose - action which Ide handles expertly and very effectively.   

The pace is relentless, the characters on all sides well-drawn and convincing.   The dialogue and commentary is a toned-down echo of Carl Hiaasen rather than a hepped-up Raymond Chandler.   The only mis-step in 300 pages is naming the hero.

The Agamemnon of Aeschylus - Louis Macneice

 I keep rediscovring Louis MacNeice.   He was of course pivotal to my thesis on radio drama, having revolutionised the form during World War II, and he is also central to the second series of monographs I am current researching.   The Agamemnon of Aeschylus was translated by MacNeice in 1936, long before he took to radio, but it was performed by the BBC after he scored a massive success with Christopher Columbus and The Dark Tower.   Originally MacNeice made his version for Rupert Doone's Group Theatre, again a central element of my current research.   They certainly hadn't performed it by August 1936 when MacNeice wrote the preface for the Faber first edition, which is what I have been reading.

I of course studied the Oresteia during my first degree at Hull, but that was in the first term (we did the history of drama chronologically) and is now getting on for fifty-three years ago.   I was not a great fan of the lecturer who did the Greeks, nor he of me.   I have tended to avoid them since though I still treasure my Penguin Classic edition.   MacNeice is only concerned with the first play of the trilogy, in which Agamemnon returns to Argos in triumph, having defeated and destroyed Troy.   Aeschylus, said to have been a warrior as a young man, is much more interested in the curse laid upon the House of Atreus.   

Atreus was the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus.   He invited his brother to a feast and served up the butchered remains of his nieces and nephews; only the newborn Aegisthus survived and was brought up in exile.   Agamemnon and Menelaus both became Argive kings and married sisters, Clytemnestra and Helen respectively.   Helen we know ran off with Paris, hence the Trojan war.   Clytemnestra was thought to be loyal to her husband but during his ten-year absence she has become the secret lover of Aegisthus.   She hates Agamemnon because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigeneia to the gods to get a fair wind for Troy.   Now he is finally back, bringing with him one of the Trojan women alloted as slaves to the Greek leaders.   Agamemnon was given Princess Cassandra, daughter of Priam and Hecuba, the prophetess no one believes.   Clytemnestra assumes Cassandra is Agamemnon's sex slave - so she murders them both.

This being Greek drama, the earliest surviving, all this happens in continuous time and the action is all offstage until the 'reveal' of the murder scene.   The audience gets everything reported by the chorus and heralds, the main characters make long set speeches which are then discussed and debated by the chorus.  This, however, all happens on the stage - the raised area at one end of the circular 'orchestra' with a single story building to represent houses, palaces, and general places within.   What scholars argue about is what use, if any, was made of the huge orchestra space.   They tend to agree that it was a dancing area but since we have no extant Greek choreography---

It has always seemed plain to me that the dancers interacted with the drama - registering shock, horror, amusement, concern etc.   It seems to me inevitable that reported action (like, for example, the story of Atreus) was enlivened by being acted out in dance or mime, and that the orchestra did indeed involve live music.

Aeschylus, who died in 456 BC, is the earliest Greek playwright we know of.   That doesn't mean he was necessarily the first, and I doubt very much that the Oresteia was his first play.   He is far too sophisticated for that.   Note, for example, how he breaks up the long speeches with some fast, snappy dialogue between Clytemnestra and the Chorus Leader.   Note also his stagecraft: rather than start with the Chorus, he begins with the watchman, alone on the palace roof, standing guard through the night, as he has done for the past year, and bored out of his skull.   He sees the beacon fire: hasn't a clue what it means.   He descends from the roof - and then the Chorus arrives, a chorus with an identity; they are all old men, the Elders of Argos - and they arrive already debating what the news might be.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Agamemnon as imagined by Louis MacNeice, who was definitely taking his first tentative steps in dramaturgy.   I am tempted to try a paper on how Aeschylus might have influenced MacNeice's next theatrical steps.

It's niche, I know.   But it's my niche.

Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon - Joyce Carol Oates

 Another Joyce Carol Oates?   Yes and no.   Strictly speaking it's Rosamond Smith, a pseudonym Oates used between 1987 and 2001.   And yes, it's another Joyce Carol Oates because it is not possible to have too much of Joyce Carol Oates because she has written so much - and is still writing, more than sixty years after her first novel - and her range is so vast that there has to always be something that appeals.   And there will be more Joyce Carol Oates on this blog because this is only the first of four 'Smith' works (two novels and and two shortish stories) bundled together as Double Trouble in this magnificent new collection from Hard Case Crime, which I was eager to acquire as soon as it was published.

Starr Bright is the story of sisters Sharon and Lily, sisters doubly close in that they are near-identical twins but very different in personality.   Sharon was always that little bit more eye-catching, Lily tending to fade into the background.   Sharon dreams of stardom since her first public appearance on a local TV talent show for kids (featuring the eponymous 'Starr Bright') and heads for the big city at sixteen, returning only once to give birth to a daughter, whom Lily brings up as her own.

Dreams don't always come true.   Now Sharon is nudging forty, losing her looks, and going to cheap motels with unpleasant men to pay the bills.   Sharon and Lily are the daughters of a hellfire pastor - their names are actually Rose of Sharon and Lily of the Valley.   Lily, having stayed home and married and brought up her sister's daughter and cared for her father in his years of long decline, has largely lost her faith.   But Sharon, one night in one particularly skanky motel, is filled with a sense of fire and brimstone, and murders her client, painting stars on the wall and slogans about pigs dying in the victim's blood.   She obviously steals his wallet and his car and thus starts on a career of murder across America.

Finally she turns up on Lily's doorstep, shattered and broken.   She stays over for a few weeks, befriending her daugher Deedee (Dierdre of the Sorrows) though never letting on she is really her mother, flirting a little with Lily's husband Wes, and generally rediscovering her sister and rebuilding a relationship.   Lily, of course, believes she is saving her sibling.   But Sharon has one last mission, one final curtain-call for her demonic alter ego Starr Bright...

It is, of course, a fantastic book, a genuine psychological thriller.   The amount of care Oates/Smith puts into her characters is astonishing, as is the depth of the backstory.   Lethal though Sharon is, humdrum though Lily seems to be, we end up caring for them both.   And it's not just the women, though they are the focus; Wes is the one who has to try and find a balance between the two of them and has a couple of brilliantly executed scenes.

By the way, if you're thinking that 'Rosamond Smith' seems a somewhat lame nom de plume, Oates's first husband and co-founder of The Ontario Review Inc which owns her copyright was Professor Raymond J Smith.

A Reasonable Doubt - Julian Symons

 Got this in a double offer with  The Man Who Lost His Wife (reviewed here last month).  This was the one that caught my eye, the one I really wanted - but it turns out I was much more interested in the novel.   This is non-fiction, stories of famous cases in which Symons argues the accused should never have been convicted, let alone hanged.

What it actually is is three longish accounts of cases in which there really was precious little doubt: Steinie Morrison which was a cause celebre in the first half of the Twentieth Century; the famous porthole case in which a South African minor star was shoved out of the titular porthole and never found; and a squalid saga of feckless husband murdering miserable wife - the Yarmouth Murder, which I was unfamiliar with.   In the latter two cases there is surely no conceivable doubt who did it; Symons' arguments are spurious and take precious little account of the judicial decision-making process.   Obviously I agree that the killers should never have been hanged; the death penalty is always and inexcusably barbaric.   Steinie Morrison, however, was not hanged.   Because there was some doubt (whether it was 'reasonable doubt' is arguable), his sentence was commuted and he died in prison.

The book is padded out with short accounts in which by and large nobody was convicted, though there is precious little doubt who killed the Earl of Erroll or the somewhat unpleasant Sir Harry Oakes.  The one that caught my imagination was the apparently pointless murder of taxi driver Evelyn Foster in January 1931 (in fact, though, the chapter is so hastily put together that I had to Google the date).

It's a book very much of its time (1960) and we should remember, back then hanging was still going on in Britain.   I'm not at all sure which side of the debate Symons was on.

A Prince and a Spy - Rory Clements

 I have reviewed many of Rory Clements' wartime spy series on this blog.   I have enjoyed them all.   This, from 2021, may be the most enjoyable.   Clements sticks to his genre; his mastery of period detail is second to none.   Sometimes he builds his story around a true historical event, as is the case here, with the death in an RAF flying boat accident over Scotland, of HRH George Duke of Kent in 1942.   I was aware of this incident - indeed, I recently watched a TV documentary about it.   But I had somehow got it confused with the defection of Rudolf Hess, which was actually the year before.   Ah well, Clements has straightened me out.

Any royal death by accident draws conspiracy theorists like flies to marmalade.   Clements develops a rather ingenious alternative explanation.   Prince George wasn't secretly flying somewhere, he was returning from a secret meeting somewhere.  On that simple but brilliant inversion the entire novel is constructed.

Professor Tom Wilde has been seconded from Cambridge to the nascent American OSS in London.   With an infant son at home, this puts a massive strain on his domestic arrangements.   He gets involved with the case because President Rossevelt wants to pay official American respects to the late Prince, whose own infant son (Prince Michael) is the President's godson.   So Tom heads for Scotland with an official guarddog in the shape of gay, dandruff-ridden Walter Quayle.   Quayle gets beaten up after propositioning a local lad, which temporarily leave Tom ftee to explore certain anomalies surrounding the crash site.   These include another local lad who claims to have found a woman's body there.

In fact Tom has already met the woman in question, who is very much alive.   He has also been reunited with her platonic boyfriend, a former student of his, who committed suicide in front of him on a train home to Cambridge.   Tom also runs across the young woman's father, the boyfriend's former tutor, whom he finds murdered and dying.   Tom is seen covered in the father's blood and therefore becomes the main supsect for the murder.

That's already quite a slice of plot and there are several levels more.   Clements handles it all with aplomb.  Mainly this is due to his brisk pace - at the end of the day it is, after all, a thriller.   There are fascinating minor characters, several of them associated with a colourful London nightspot, based I suspect on David Tennant's legendary Gargoyle Club.

The Bone Garden - Simon Beckett

 I posted a review of Beckett's series before (The Chemistry of Death, back in 2021).  That was his first, this I believe is his seventh.   The Bone Garden is every bit as goof as Chemistry.   Forensic anthropologist David Hunter is running away again, this time from being dumped by his latest girlfriend.   Despite the encroachment of winter he has jumped at the invitation to drive up to Scotland and join in the search for a missing person.   He gets lost along the way and ends up marooned in Cumbria, in a tiny village called Edendale (nice touch) with one pub and a plantation full of bodies.

I have to admit, at this point I winced.   Oh-oh, we're into American Werewolf territory - or Straw Dogs short of a Susan George character.   Still, I thought, these things always have an illogical premise; murder itself is the ultimate illogical action.   And Beckett tackles the absurdity head-on.   What is going on in Edendale is a generational family feud between the grim Beddoes clan and the risen-above-themselves Reese family.   Hunter finds himself the somewhat frozen meat in the stale bread sandwich.   Then Beckett starts to pile on the twists.   I saw the first couple coming but the final one took me completely by surprise, which it really shouldn't have, seeing as it's a theme in my own fiction (perhaps that is a sign of how skillfully Beckett lays the groundwork).

It's a very accomplished book.   As a serial protagonist Hunter can only grow incrementally.   He has certainly developed enough in the last five years to maintain our interest.   The incidental characters, who start off so stereotypical, all have sufficient depth to keep us involved and keep us guessing.   Beckett is really good at handling suspense and peril.   The action sequences are exceptional.

The Man Who Lost His Wife - Julian Symons

 Julian Symons (1912-94) was an eminent crime writer and reviewer of the second half of the Twentieth Century.   A big hit of his, which I read when it came out, was The Blackheath Poisonings (1978).   In America he was published by Harper under the legendary Joan Khan imprint.   In Britain he was probably best known as a critic in all the most respected journals.

The Man Who Lost His Wife (1970) was one of the novels Khan published in America.   Hers was a crime/mystery list, and yet there is no crime in The Man Who Lost His Wife (although the protagonist thinks he might have committed one and certainly intended to) and precious little mystery.   What we have, in fact, is the story of a man undergoing his midlife crisis.

Gilbert Whelan is a stuffy London publisher, who lives in the suburbs with his second wife.   Whelan never wanted to be a publisher.   His father built the firm but he and Gilbert were not close.   As a young man Gilbert dropped out with his first wife and their son and joined a back-to-nature cult of the kind which preceded hippiedom on both sides of the Atlantic.   But Gilbert couldn't keep up his rebellion and slowly slipped back into conformity.   He is middleaged now (we don't know exactly how old) and resigned to his fate.   Then his wife Virginia tells him she needs to take a holiday without him.   Which she promptly does.

In her absence Gilbert finds himself subsumed into a messy world of American novelists, buy-out offers, parties and dubious night clubs.   In search of breathing space he decides to go abroad, track down Virginia and save his marriage.   Only Virginia isn't in Dubrovnik where she said she would be.   She was there but left, hotel staff believe, for Sarajevo.   Gilbert follows, on the way becoming involved with more dubious folk, a roguish English travelling salesman and an American hippie couple.   In Dibrovnik he also had a passionate fling with a tour guide and now wants to dump Virginia and marry her.   In Sarajevo he also has to deal with a famous Italian author who his (Gilbert's) racier business partner has recruited for their list.

It's a really good novel, albeit I don't see how it can classify as a crime or mystery novel, though that is indeed what Pan claim it to be.   I picked up another Symons work in a twofer offer with this - a non-fiction book about famous disputed murders - and am enjoying that two.   Symons is duly added to my list of authors I must revisit and read more of.   I must admit I'm really keen on finding his biographer of his brother A J A Symons, author of The Quest for Corvo (which I am also keen to read).

Butcher - Joyce Carol Oates

 Joyce Carol Oates has to be a living literary phenomenon.   I have been following her work for over fifty years and she is still going strong, still getting better and better.   Butcher is as recent as 2024.   How could she possibly bring herself to undertake a massive task like this?   In her stride seems to be the answer.

She has never been better.   It is as if the awfulness of her subject matter (the early, gruesome years of male physicians' attempts to understand women's minds and bodies) spurs Oates on to greater heights.  Dr Silas Aloysius Weir, who until 1851 had been repulsed by women's gynological processes, finds himself the director of the Women's Lunatic Asylum in Trenton New Jersey.   Eager to make a name for himself he experiments on the women supposedly in his care and so builds himself a national reputation as the Father of Gyno-Psychiatry.   I know from my own research how close Oates's Weir comes to the ghastly truth; frankly, it continues today with so-called specialists needlessly mutilating women for no other reason I can fathom save sadism and mysogyny.   

Ten years on, Weir's patients strike back.   For a man, these scenes are equally horrific, but for a (hopefully) balanced man, you have to say it's deserved.   And yet I was quite moved with Oates's depiction of Weir in his later years - retired, reclusive, refusing to discuss what happened and flatly disclaiming any knowledge of who was responsible (although we know that he knows).   I found this a masterful and at the same time compassionate use of dramatic irony.   Oates never at any stage loses sight of the humanity of any of her characters (which, of course, is precisely what Weir has done with his patients).

A modern masterpiece but not for the fainthearted.

Polostan - Neal Stephenson

 I've been reading about Stephenson for a while and wondering where to start with him.   This seemed (and was) the perfect place, one of his latest (2024) and the first in a new series (Bomb Light).   I liked it a lot and found it surprisingly accessible.   The picaresque story of Dawn Rae Bjornberg, born in Montana but largely raised by her Ukranian Communist stepfather in Soviet Russia where she's known by her patronymic and the Russian version of her first name, Aurora.  As a teenager she slips between nations and identities and ends up - for this volume - spying for Beria in Moscow in 1934.   She is bilingual and smart but her special talent on both sides of the political divide, is polo - hence the title.

The story is dense but fairly races along and Dawn/Aurora is always great fun to be around, whether she's advertising sensible shoes at the World's Fair in Chicago or being tortured by Stalin's goons in Siberia.   This being the early Thirties, she has a fascination with Bonnie and Clyde and reference is made to her time with the Borrow Gang - but that is clearly for a future instalment; we don't see it here.   And this is how Stephenson really hooks us.   By chopping locale and timeframe he introduces us to things that have happened to Dawn or Aurora before they actually happen, for example, the question of a child she says she had and 'lost'.

I know Stephenson has published a second instalment - called simply D, so no clues there) and I can't wait to read it.   Meanwhile, I'm keeping an eye out for work from his back catalogue.

The Complete Doom of London Series - Fred M White

 Fred M White was a proflific author of stories for magazines and periodicals at the end of the Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth.   In 1903 he developed a personal niche in the London Catastrophe genre.  In this collection we have all six of them.   The quality varies with the nature of the threat - nobody is going to get overexcited at a Stock Market Fraud ('A Bubble Burst'), though how it is done is intriguing.   On the other hand, water-borne pestilence ('The River of Death') is hugely relevant to us 120 years later, something even a dedicated Victorian doom-monger could never have envisaged.

Fred White, unlike Richard Jefferies who pioneered the genre (After London, 1886) is an optimist.   His 'doomed' London always survives.    Like Jefferies, however, he tends towards the consequences of man interfering with nature - smog ('The Four Days' Night'), big freeze ('The Four White Days') and pollution ('The Dust of Death' and the aforemention 'River of Death').   The exception is 'The Invisible Force' in which an electric spark ignites a gas leak and blows up the Tube network, also relevant today, though the way it happens is not.

My favourites were 'Invisble Force' and 'River of Death', but all fizzed with life and ideas.  White has a tendency to rely on experts in their field whereas we have been explicitly told by our political masters to ignore them.   Not that doing so will ever lead to disaster ... surely?

Caesar _ Allan Massie

 I started with Massie's Antony, reviewed here at the end of February, and now I'm onto Caesar.   Historically I'm obviously out of sequence, in terms of Massie's bibliography I'm not so sure.   It matters not: Shakespeare rendered them as standalone stories, so we can't quibble when Massie follows suit.

As with Antony, the story is in the hands of a peripheral character, though not as peripheral as the secretary-slave Antony.   Our narrator here is Decimus Brutus ("Mouse"), general, admiral, adviser and assassin, not to be confused with his cousin and fellow assassin Marcus Brutus ("Markie").   Mouse is being held captive by the Gauls, some time after the assassination, and is writing his memoir.   He recalls meeting Caesar as a young lad - Caesar was leaving Mouse's mother's bedchamber, having done what Caesar was always doing with other men's wives.   Mouse goes on to cross the Rubicon with Caesar and accompanies him to Egypt where Mouse also has a fling with Queen Cleopatra.

But back in Rome, as Caesar is planning to invade Parthia, Mouse begins to doubt the hero's judgment.  Caesar is dictator for life but plans on passing power to his nephew Octavian, with Mouse as his guardian.  Surely this is a form of kingship, which in turn means an end to the Republic and a loss of freedom for Roman citizens?

Mouse gets sucked into a conspiracy led by his father-in-law Cassius.   Mouse is tasked with bringing in his cousin Markie, which he ultimately does.   No one, however, can get Antony or Lepidus to pick a side.   Cicero, the veteran windbag, is excluded from the plot; whatever the outcome, he will orate in favour of the winners.

The trick with retelling a tale where we all know what happened is to find a way of maintaining the suspense.   Massie succeeds - I won't say how, obviously, only that it worked for me.   I like Massie's Roman novels a great deal and will certainly track down the others.   I may well even seek out his work in other periods.

The Persian - David McCloskey

 Having found my way to McCloskey via The Seventh Floor (reviewed very recently below), I was made up to find The Persian in my local library.   I mean, how of-the-moment is it possible to get?   And that, I'm afraid, was the problem.   Israelis and Iranian false flag ops - it's too painfully of the moment - the only element lacking is a demented and corrupr US President blackmailed into participating (but who would dream that up?).   There can be no question about McCloskey's skill as a writer but I couldn't engage with this at all.   My fault, not his.

One problem for me, technically, was the lack of a major player I could identify with.   I don't care about the 'hero' Kam Esfahani, a failed Iranian-Swedish-Jewish dentist who gets drawn into Mossad black ops whose story is being extracted under duress by his Iranian captors.   Perhaps if we'd been shown more of what breaks him ...   The core of his story, which should I suspect is meant to make us empathise with him - is his affair with Roya Shabani, the widow of an Iranian scientist who Kam helped assassinate.   Kam rather cynically seduces her and turns her into a double agent but he still has feelings for her.   It's plausible, I suppose - Stockholm Syndrome and all that - but I just don't buy it on an emotional level.   At the end of the day what we have here is a weak momma's boy and a woman victimised by two mysogynistic theocracies.

For me the most captivating character here is the Mossad action man Arik Glitzman.   His motivation, by the end, we can absolutely identify with, and I would love to see him reappear in a future McCloskey novel.   The action sequences are superbly executed, the fieldcraft, as in The Seventh Floor, completely convincing.   McCloskey, in my view, is now 100% the most significant US writer of contemporary spy fiction.    

The Dymock Poets - Sean Street

 By far the best take on this unique event.   In August 1914, just as the western part of World War I was beginning, a group of poets came together in a cluster of Gloucestershire villages.  Some came and went, others lived there anyway, and another couple stayed just for the month.   Those that had families brought them with them.   The ostensible purpose, of four of them at least, was to oversee the poetry journal they had set up.   The gathering is important because the fourth and final issue of New Numbers, published the following spring, contained Rupert Brooke's war poems including 'The Soldier' which was to make him, for one week only, the most famous living poet in the world and thereafter the most successful poet that has probably ever lived.   His royalties, which he left to Walter de la Mare (who wasn't at Dymock) and Lascelles Abercrombie and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, who both lived there, funded them for the rest of their lives and, even though Btooke has been dead 111 years now and is long out of copyright, the interest on his bequest may still be funding poets today.

The fourth New Numbers poet was John Drinkwater.   He was a middling poet at best and didn't need Brooke's monetary support.   He had a day job as director of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, the first purpose-built repertory theatre in the world, funded by Birmingham millionaire Barry Jackson.   In 1918 Drinkwater would hit the bigtime with his play Abraham Lincoln, a massive success on both sides of the Atlantic.   Street covers this in his book, which is fair enough, because all the Dymock poets wrote plays - and the famous poet who lived close by, John Masefield, had broken through as a playwright before jump-starting the revival of popular English poetry with The Everlasting Mercy (actually set in one of the 'Dymock' villages) in 1911.

That village was Ledbury, where Masefield was born and where the other wing of the Dymock poets were to be found in August 1914.   One wasn't English, the other wasn't yet a poet, and Street rightly gives a significant amount of scrutiny to their side of the story.   Robert Frost and Edward Thomas were much older, rising forty.   Frost, later the 'American Poet Laureate' who recited at Kennedy's inauguration (Masefield, of course was the English one at the time), hadn't broken through in his homeland.   So in 1912 he moved his family to England, initially settling in a bungalow in Beaconsfield.   In London he met the poets who gravitated to the Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury.   Frost attended the opening; Gibson was actually living above the shop at the time.   Initially Frost was swept up by his compatriot Ezra Pound, but Imagism was not Frost's style and he soon moved on to Gibson, and through Gibson, Abercrombie.   Abercrombie was already living in Dymock (technically Ryton).   Gibson, Abercrombie, Drinkwater and Brooke were all heavily featured in the first Georgian Anthology (1913), an enormous success which funded the bookshop for the next twenty years.   Because the editor, Edward Marsh, chose to publish his contributors alphabetically Abercrombie came first and the other three were all well to the front and thus more likely to be read.   Gibson, who had been publishing for almost twenty years by this point, was independently breaking through in America.

Ar the end of 1912 Gibson got married.   His American earnings enabled him to move out of his room above the bookshop, and he naturally chose to rent near his friend Abercrombie (who had been able to rent in Ryton because his sister had married the lord of the manor).   In 1914 Frost, who had managed to publish two books of verse, joined them, only a mile or so across the fields in Ledbury.   In October 1913 Frost had met the leading poetry critic of the day, Edward Thomas, who had done wonders for the sales of Gibson, Abercrombie, Brooke, Drinkwater and Frost himself.   Thomas, who was profoundly depressed and in danger of breaking down under the pressure of hack journalism, became incredibly close to Frost.   He visited Ledbury many times in 1914 and decided to rent a local farmhouse for the whole of August.   The Ledbury group mingled with the Dymock group.   Thomas's other emotional support, the future children's writer Eleanor Farjeon came for a week or so.   And Brooke came down in the hectic weeks between his return from America and enlistment.   One evening they were all together in Gibson's home, The Old Nailshop.

Thomas, at this time, had never written a poem, but Farjeon and Frost persuaded him to try.   By the time he was killed in action at Arras on April 9 1917 he had written 147 poems and had a collection about to come out.   All of this Street manages to cover in 160 pages.   Of course there are things that could be developed further - personally I would and shall keep the plays for a separate monograph - but as a reliable, thorough and impeccably sourced account of a fascinating interlude I have not found anything better (and, believe me, I have read dozens).

On Iniquity - Pamela Hansford Johnson

 A number of factors drew me to this rarity.   Pamela Hansford Johnson was an early object of Dylan Thomas's desire who ended up marrying Leicester-born novelist, politician and all-round egghead C P Snow.   As Lady Snow PHJ attended the trial of Moors Murderers Brady and Hindley in April 1966.   The following year she worked up her articles into this monograph.

It's an odd book.   Her point is that Brady and Hindley were products of the so-called liberalisation of the Sixties.   Brady became a monster, she argues, because an ineffectual state allowed him access to pornography and pornographic literature (by which she expressly means the works of the Marquis de Sade).  She has a point - but 60 years on we carry much stronger pornography in our phones and devices and reading literature is a habit dying a slow and protracted death.   Yes, there are serial killers with far greater tallies today - in 1967 there was only really Jack the Ripper and a few oddballs in America - but today's monster are mass killers who often also kill themselves and who are motivated by, of all things, puritanical religosity.   The last serial killers for sex in the UK were the Wests, both out of the way before the Millennium.

Another thing PHJ didn't know was the true tally for Brady and Hindley.   Hindley only admitted the murders of Keith Bennett and Pauline Reade in the Eighties.   PHJ's sadism theory really relies in the horrific ordeal of poor Lesley Ann Downey, which I still remember hearing about as a ten year-old.   All five murders were ghastly and unforgivable but only Lesley Ann was degraded to that extent.   Could it just be, in fact, that Brady was simply a monster who found himself the perfect ally in Myra Hindley?

On Iniquity is very well written and a fascinating sociological snapshot of its era.

The Second Traitor - Alex Gerlis

 I have read two of Gerlis's Richard Price thrillers recently.   I enjoyed both with reservations; they seemed unusually slow to get off the ground but once they did, they rattled along and ended eminently satisfactorily.   The Second Traitor, which must be one of his latest, explores the same World War II territory, but is otherwise entirely different, starting with a bang and never really letting up.

It's the second of Gerlis's Double Agent series and is exactly that.   Everyone is, or could be, a double agent.  British, German, Russian - even Irish and Pro-Nazi British: no one's status is entirely clear.   Does it matter that I haven't read the first in the series?   Not one jot, which is how it should be.   Anything we need to know is revealed over the course of the book whilst the main issue (who, if anyone, is our 'good guy'?) is left wide open.

It seems that our hero is Charles Cooper, aka Christopher Shaw and/or Malcolm Lyle, who is definitely a double, known to the Russians as 'Bertie'.   The time is 1940 and the Russians have a non-aggression pact with Hitler - which shouldn't be taken to mean they are also at war with Britain.   Their status, like Cooper's, is best described as equivocal.   They are, however, keen to ensure that Britain resists any German invasion, otherwise Stalin believes Hitler will turn his empire-building east.   So the NKVD feeds Cooper with information he can pass on to his branch of MI6, the Invasion Warning Sub-Committee.   Meanwhile the Sub-Committee is sheilding Cooper from Murray, who is going round killing anyone who might betray the pro-Nazi Group.   Meanwhile MI6 is keen to identify the other Soviet Agent they know by codename, Archie.   We encounter Archie at intervals through the complex story, merrily killing and betraying agents in the field, whilst getting no clue to his (or her) identity.

The plot is extremely complex.  The timeline is very compressed - the summer of 1940 - but flicks back and forth constantly.   Gerlis makes it so deliberately.   After all, a spider's web is anything but a straight line.   I really enjoyed The Second Traitor and can't wait to get hold of the rest of the series.

The Final Score - Don Winslow

 A couple of years ago Don Winslow announced he was retiring from writing (to spend more time excoriating Donald Trump, if I remember right).   Turns out he only retired from writing novels.   Short novels, which is what he calls the six pieces here, he still writes and publishes.

I am an enormous fan - but lost a little faith with The Force and couldn't get on with the City trilogy.   But the Cartel trilogy is unsurpassed in modern crime literature.  I loved Savages and the surfer crew in The Gentlemen's Hour.   More recently I thoroughly enjoyed his masterly continuation of Trevanian's Shibumi (Satori).   All of these, I believe, are reviewed on this blog.   So I was never not going to pick up The Final Score on the offchance it was more like the Winslow who had once blown me away.

And boy, is it just!   Every single one of the six a winner.  Even better, 'The Lunch Break' is a return for Boone and his surfer crew.   For me the sextet starts really well with 'The Final Score' itself and gets better with each story thereafter.  'The Lunch Break' is fifth of the six and the final, longest story, 'Collision', is so good, it could be an outtake from The Cartel.   In case I have inferred there is something retrospective going on here, let me be clear: these six short novels are fresh, entirely original, in some instances going further in technique than Winslow has gone before.  'True Story', for example, is a dualogue between two wise guys who aren't even given names, who nevertheless bring the mob world to life in banter alone and deliver a powerful twist in the tail.

An absolute treat from start to finish.   Thank you, Don.

The Diamond Smugglers - Ian Fleming

 A collector's item in two senses - first, non-Bond adult non-fiction by Fleming, and second, a Fleming book I actually enjoyed.

Taking the second first, it's been a while since I said it on this blog, so for clarity, I'll say it again.   I do not like James Bond.   I read most of the original novels when I was a lad but fell out with the films with Thunderball.   To the best of my knowledge I haven't watched a Bond movie all the way through since.   I tried the novels again in middle age and concluded they were crap.   Some of the posthumous follow-ons were better but still nothing I could get excited about.   There were soon limits to even those that I could not bring myself to cross.   Gardner yes, Amis OK, Faulks ... a bridge too far for me.

Back now to this, which I saw mentioned on Spybrary and found in this smart 2013 reissue by Vintage.  The book itself dates from 1957 when Sir Percy Sillitoe, former Glasgow Police and MI5 Chief, let it be known that Fleming, author of Diamonds Are Forever, was the chap to write up an account of Sillitoe's retirement job in charge of the International Diamond Security Organisation, set up to investigate and put a stop to the diamond smuggling business.

The smuggling enterprise was vast.   Far more was seeping out of Africa than was sent legitimately.   The licit and illicit markets were completely separate, with different price scales.   The fact was, in some parts of Africa someone strolling along a riverbank could pick up stones big enough to make them rich for life.

The task had been finished by 1957 and the smugglers at least curtailed.   Sillitoe had been in charge from London but the man on the ground, John Collard - called 'John Blaize' in the book because he was ex-MI5 - was the one with all the details, the one Fleming met and interviewed over ten days in Tangier.   The vast majority of the book is Collard's first person account.   This works well for me - I have never found Fleming's dialogue anything more than perfunctory.   On the other hand Fleming (and perhaps only Fleming) could conjure up so effortlessly the tawdry glamour of the neutral ground of Tangier.   The collaboration is a winning formula.  It's very short - the perfect length for its story - and I raced through it in two sessions.

Spectrum II - Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest

 Amis and the polymath Robert Conquest published five Spectrum sci fi anthologies from 1961.   This, self-evidently, is the second, published in 1962, contain eight stories from the period 1946-58.  Those anthologised are mainly American because in that period sci fi was mainly American.  Only Brian Aldiss is British and I find him very difficult to get on with.   James Blish, it should be pointed out, did not move to the UK until 1964 and his story here, 'Bridge', dates from 1952.

The longest story here is Wyman Guin's 'Beyond Bedlam' (1951).   I enjoyed it - it is clever and well-sustained twist on schitzophrenia.    Other, shorter stories, such as Asimov's 'The Feeling of Power' and Mark Clifton's 'Sense from Thought Divide' seemed to me pedestrian and unambitious.  'Resurrection' (A E van Vogt) and 'Vintage Season' (Henry Kuttner) were more substansial and more satisfying.   Best of all was Philip K Dick's 'Second Variety' from 1953, very early in his career and twenty years before he underwent his psychic revelation.   It has the clever twist of the better short stories whilst developing empathetic characters and an Armageddon-like warscape that, at the time of reading it, was only too relevant for me.

Blish's 'Bridge', I should point out, is typical Blish, a deconstructed metaphor.   When I was a lad and Blish was still amongsr us, I read his Doctor Mirabilis.   That's a book I really should read again.

The Seventh Floor - David McCloskey

 The critics hail the new le Carre ... and, for once, they're right.  Strictly speaking, at the heart of The Seventh Floor is the old le Carre, as McCloskey freely admits in the acknowledgements at the end.   He takes the essential element of the great Smiley double-tap and, incredibly, makes them better.   No mean feat for only his third novel.

It's the hunt for a suspected mole inside the CIA.   Artemis Proctor is forced out of the Agency after twenty-five years by the incoming directorate.  She finds work wrestling alligators at her cousin's theme park in Florida.  Yes, Proctor is very different from George Smiley; but like him she cannot give up on spycraft.   She knows that any mole has to be one of her own tightknit group in the Russian unit.   Also, one of her team, Sam Joseph, has been taken and tortured by the Russians, having been betrayed by the mole.   On his release (and subsequent retirement) Proctor and Joseph team up to investigate.

To say much more about the plot risks giving too much away.   Suffice to say it is clever, twisty and thoroughly thought through.   I would like to talk about McCloskey's skill as a writer.   His characters are complex and deep.   They all have lives, of a sort, outside spying.   Artemis Proctor is a powerhouse, all the cliches of a debased Bond crammed into a tangle-haired Amazon barely five feet tall.   McCloskey also gives us the Russian side - better-mannered but more ruthless and both willing and able to play the long game.   McCloskey's prose is refined, his dialogue spot-on. 

It came to the denousement and I thought, Wait, there's forty or more pages still to go.   And I thought, oh no, McCloskey's plodding through what happened next, tying up all the loose ends.   Well, I tried to reassure myself, it could be worse.   It could have been a taster from the next in the series...   How wrong I was.   McCloskey was playing with me like a cat with a fatally injured bird.   Yes, ends were tied up.  But what a twist!   Absolutely brilliant.

On the front cover General David Petraeus calls McCloskey "The best contemporary spy novelist", and I'm not inclined to argue wit  h the US commander in Iraq and Afghanistan whose retirement job was as CIA Director.  In other words, the man with the office on the seventh floor at Langley.

Sea of Spies - Alex Gerlis

 Second in the Richard Prince series, Sea of Spies follows straight on from Prince of Spies (reviewed recently on this blog).   It is now the middle of 1943: Prince is back in England, Hanne Jakobsen, who helped him escape the Nazis, is in Ravensbruck concentration camp.   Prince is in England but not back in the police force.   His infant son Henry has been abducted in an adoption scam and Prince has been searching for any trace of him.

Meanwhile MI6 is keen to disrupt the clandestine flow of chromium, essential for missile production, from Romania to Nazi-occupied Czechoslavakia via Turkey.   Turkey is officially neutral and denies all knowledge, despite pressure from Churchill's Chief of Intelligence Sir Roland Pearson.   So Pearson leans on his old schoolfellow Tom Gilbey who persuades Prince to go to Istanbul under the guise of irish journalist Michael Eugene Doyle to gather evidence.   While Prince is away Gilbey puts two retired Scotland Yard detectives on the hunt for the missing boy.

Just gather evidence and get out of there - those are Prince's instructions.   Of course, that's now how it pans out.   Prince is suckered into rescuing a different boy from Nazi-occupied Greece, in return for which he is smuggled aboard a ship carrying chromium to the former Skoda factory in Pilsen.

The story itself is excellent.   The problem is, the main plotline isn't raised until Chapter 6 and Prince doesn't appear until Chapter 7.   As in Prince of Spies, Gerlis takes too long to get going.   Personally I would have started with Chapter 6 and filtered everything else in later.   Proofreading, as ever these days, isn't perfect but a more serious problem is the lack of invention with names.   There are too many Martins, for example.   Likewise, more diligent editing would have revealed clumsily repeated words in the same sentence.   Small flaws in themselves but they add up.

On the other hand, Gerlis's geopgraphical setting is first rate, totally convincing.   Prince's character continues to develop and there are interesting characters emerging at MI6.   Once it gets moving, Sea of Spies is engrossing and compelling.   I never thought I could get even slightly interested in chromium.

I like the sound of Ring of Spies, the next in the Prince series - and then there's Gilbey's other series, Spy Masters... 

Antony - Allan Massie

 Allan Massie, who died earlier this month, wrote a tetralogy about major Roman figures, Augustus, Caesar, Tiberius and Mark Antony.    Obviously there must be overlap between them, however Antony, the last to be written but the first I have read, gives no clue as to how Massie deals with it.

Antony certainly stands alone.   It starts with Caesar's murder and ends with Mark Antony's suicide, a period of fourteen years in which Antony ruled half the empire, won, lost and won back Cleopatra and got through several wives.   Yet it is a crisp, short book, only 210 pages.   In practice it is two books with shared content.   Antony, at the end of his career, is dictating a memoir to his slave and secretary Critias.   Antony is depressed and drinking heavily.   When he loses interest or passes out Critias takes over commentary and narrative.   Critias has been in Antony's service from birth; he has been all over the Roman world with him; but Critias is a slave not a warror, he plays a part in the politicking but no part at all in the warmaking.   Antony is an instinctive politician but a magnificent soldier.   Critias is a fastidious homosexual.   Antony is bi.

I was enthralled.   Yes, I am reasonably familiar with all these Romans with complicated names, less so with some of the battles they are involved in.   Massie is a reliable guide and an exceptionally gifted writer.   I shall be reading more.

Peace on the Western Front - Mattia Signorini

 You know you are getting old when you come across a book written by someone too young to know how hackneyed his subject was when you were young.   Admittedly Mattia Signorini is Italian and Italians were not involved on the Western Front but it seems the Christmas Truce of 1914 was news to him when he was hiking in the Italian Alps in 2019.

Now his short novel has been translated into English (beautifully done by Vicki Satlow) and is seeking the attention of a nation who has had the Christmas Truce rammed down its throat for over a century.   Fortunately, Signorini's approach is different and wonderfully effective.   We begin with an injured veteran returning to Flanders Field with his young son in 1933.   He is German but he tells his  boy the story of an English soldier he came across, not in No Man's Land but in Ploegsteen Forest.

We then switch to the Englishman, William Turner, who has volunteered for the war that will be over by Christmas.   William is searching for meaning in life by keeping a promise he made to his dying mother to do something to help other people.   Like everyone else in this volunteer army he is lost.   Fortunately he soon makes friends with Edgar Martin, another misfit, who hopes to make a career in the army - anything being better than the wretched hand to mouth existence which was all he'd known in England.

The whole story is compressed into the single month of December 1914.   The misery and horror is all there yet friendship and fellowship somehow rise above it.   Both William and Edgar are wounded in that period yet both are back on the frontline before Christmas.   The end is not the football match but what happens immediately after, when William walks towards the German Line.   What actually happens to him is left ambiguous, the highpoint of an extremely effective novel.   Highly recommended.

B.E.A.S.T - Charles Eric Maine

 I have been fascinated by Charles Eric Maine since I learnt that he wrote the first sci fi radio drama, Spaceways (1952).   In those days Maine (the pseudonym of David McIlwain, 1921-81) was at the forefront of postwar British sci fi, a more literary version of Arthur C Clarke.   I say that because Maine was much more rooted in popular fiction than the scientific Clarke; Spaceways, in many ways, is a detective story with a technological setting.   But Maine was not able to maintain his standards.   B.E.A.S.T. (1966) is A for Andromeda with an added dash of nympho dolly birds.

Having recently read Andromeda I was straightaway startled by just how similar this is.   Setting, standpoint, theme - all pretty much identical.   Obviously Maine has done more than just change the names, but not much more.   The sci fi element in both is the creation of new life forms by computing.  The computers in both are housed in remote Cold War facilities where isolated men and women go slightly off the rails.   Our hero Mark Harland is sent in by the Department of Special Services (quite a promising idea, I thought) to follow up a whistleblower report that the Research Director of RU8, Dr Charles Howard Gilley, is spending a lot of time on an off-the-books project.   Given that the official remit of RU8 is genetic warfare, clearly this is something that needs looking into.

So off Harland goes.   Everyone other than Dr Gilley is standard fare hearty young scientific males interested in pubs and girls in that order.   The object of their shared lust is super-hot programmer Synove Rayner.   She is Swedish and blonde, this is 1966, so of course she responds with enthusiasm and soon falls prey to Harland's wiles because he is to all intents and purposes a spy and, moreover, a spy who already has a 'congential nympho) on the go in London.

The mysogyny is of its period but still hard to ignore.

Dr Gilley, on the other hand, is obsessed with his not so secret program, the Biological Evolutionary Animal Simulation Test - an intelligent entity which has been evolving on the computers and which is now possessed of an enquiring mind.   Its main interest, currently, is sex.   So Gilley has snapped gyneological photos of the ever-helpful Synove to feed in to the data banks.   He has also taken in a big way to vodka.   It all ends badly, of course.   I was inescapably reminded of the end of King Kong, albeit on a more modest British scale.

In conclusion, B.E.A.S.T is highly derivative, fairly predictable, and a repository of some very outdated attitudes.   But Maine is nevertheless a skilled writer and his work is never dull.   With a bit of toleration this story is good fun with some effective moments.   I enjoyed some of the period incidentals - none of your fancypants memory sticks here, it's good old manilla folders for Mark Harland.

It is such a shame that Maine, for whatever reason, couldn't realise the early promise shown by Spaceways.

ALSO BY CHARLES ERIC MAINE and reviewed on this blog: Spaceways, The Isotope Man, The Tide Went Out, and The Darkest of Nights.

The Chimes of Midnight - Robert Shearman

 Robert Shearman is a major star of the Doctor Who universe.   He wrote the 'Dalek' episode for the revival TV series in 2005 (with the legendary line when the Doctor runs up a flight of stairs to escape the Daleks: "Elevate!").   He also wrote scripts for the Big Finish audio dramas where the Doctor survived between its TV eras and where the contemporary take on the Doctor and his universe really evolved.   The Chimes of Midnight was his 2001 script for Big Finish.   Now (in 2025) he has adapted it as a novel, the second of brand new hardback series of novelisations for BBC/Penguin Random House.   The first, apparently, was Jubilee, also by Shearman.   I want that.

Chimesof Midnight is an adventure of the Eighth Doctor, the Paul McGann Doctor.   I saw the 1996 TV movie, the only TV Whovian feature between 1987 and 2005, but can't remember much about it.   Did the Doctor have a companion then?   No idea.   But he has one in the Big Finish continuations, Charley Pollard, a high-spirited young woman who the Doctor saved from the R101 airship disaster in October 1930.   Charley was played by India Fisher in the audio drama and still is.  One of the best aspects of the Big Finish series is the continuation of casting.   That, and the fact that all the Doctors live on there in simultaneous streams.

Back to the book under review.   Yes, you can tell that it was once a play.   Or perhaps it's only the likes of me that sees the signs.   I was a radio playwright myself, and tried to novelise at least one of my scripts, and of course my PhD is in audio drama.   It makes no difference: I still had a whale of a time with the book.   The thing about Doctor Who is the concept.   The characters only exist to serve the Big Idea.   I don't want to give anything away here.   Like the best concepts - like all Oscar Wilde's best jokes - this is a simple inversion that might seem obvious in retrospect.   I say, if it's that obvious, why has nobody else, to the best of my knowledge, ever done it?

Let me also admit that even now I am working a version of it into one of my online series of stories.

Shearman is too good a writer to let his characters remain mere cyphers.   They are given sub-chapters, which Shearman calls 'hauntings', in which we get insights into their backstories.   We also get this with Charley and an intriguing hint that the Doctor has created a problem with Time by rescuing her.   We get no backstory for the Doctor, obviously, and I found it difficult to relate to him.   But the story kept me guessing to the end and thoroughly enthralled.

So enthralled that I have bought a bundle of plays from Big Finish.   I tried for the original version of Chimes of Midnight but couldn't find it on the website.  And like I stated above, I'm looking out for Jubilee.

Gunner - Alan Parks

 I've been a big fan of Parks' Harry McCoy series of crime thrillers.   Now he has opened a second strand with Joe Gunner, and I am equally enthused (with one reservation.

Let's get the reservation out of the way first.   WHATEVER HAPPENED TO PROOF READING?   The first blooper I can live with.   Anyone can make a mistake.   Trade fares instead of trade fairs (p. 15).   But the second!   The OIC at the POW camp switches between Corporal and Colonel several times in the same scene, sometimes even the same paragraph.   And to make matters worse, it happens again in his second appearance, more than a hundred pages later.   Did we proof read this AI?   Yes I suspect we did.   And Baskerville, a division of the legendary John Murray, publishers of Lord Byron, charge libraries £16.99 for this?

Rant over, Parks hits the spot with this wartime crime thriller.   Joe Gunner left Glasgow polis for the war, only to be evacuated, badly injured, from Dunkirk.   Now he has been sent home to recuperate - only to find his old boss, DI Malcolm Drummond waiting for him at the station.   "I need your help with a body, Joe."

Glasgow police have been hit hard by the outbreak of war.   Gunner was by no means the only one to enlist in September 1939.   Eighteen months in (March 1941) the force is reduced to old timers plucked out of retirement and auxilliaries like Drummond's aide Fraser Lockhart.    Organised crime has flourished and there's a secondary war about to break out between the main crime families, the McGills and the Sellars brothers.

Drummond knows that Joe is unlikely to be recalled to military service with his injuries.   He wants him back in the polis, deploying his exceptional skills as a detective and covering for the DI and all his side scams.   Gunnar wants his freedom - he offers to help for a day or two, no more.

Fat chance.   Gunnar is soon up to his neck in a multiple murder mystery involving spies, POWs, conscientious objectors, and more.   Joe's younger brother is one of conchies (or is he?), not on religious grounds but because he is pro-Russia, and Russia in March 1941 were still in a non-aggression pact with Hitler.   The ending was absolutely brilliant - Parks led me completely down the proverbial garden path.   The characters and concept are both standout and I can't wait for the next in the series. 

The Beast in the Red Forest - Sam Eastland

 I found the premise fascinating: a Finn becomes the handpicked detective of the last Russian Tsar, is then sent to the gulag by the new Soviet regime, only to be reinstated as the handpicked detective of Joseph Stalin.   This, from 2014, appears to be the fifth in the series but I had no problem starting here.

Inspector Pekkala, the legendary Emerald Eye, has gone missing.   The general view in Moscow is that he has died, but neither Stalin nor Pekkala's close friend and assistant Major Kirov believe it,   Meanwhile it is 1944 and Russia is chasing the Germans out of Ukraine.   This is where Pekkala was last seen.   Stalin dispatches Kirov with unlimited authority to find him.

At the same time Stalin is planning to exterminate the various partisan groups  or atrads who are squabbling over the future of Ukraine.   These are the same groups Kirov now has to work with, and include the group who, it comes as no surprise, Pekkala has been hiding amongst.

There is also a mysterious killer - the titular beast - who is brutally murdering Germans and Russians.   He very nearly kills Kirov.   Once Kirov and Pekkala are reunited, finding and stopping the killer becomes their mission.

Eastland reveals his identity in a roundabout way.   We are given, without explanation to begin with, documents concerning an American citizen who in the height of the US Depression in the Thirties has emigrated to Russia with his family to work at the Ford factory in Nizhni-Novgorod.  He reports that everything is fine to begin with, a worker's paradise.   But then, it seems, something goes wrong...

Once we discover who the killer is, he tells us (a stroke of pure novelistic brilliance, I thought) that he is not the only killer on the prowl, and Pekkala is launched on a last-minute race to stop the other.

It's a fabulously entertaining mix of wheels within wheels, spies and double agents, set in a unique time and place, and peppered with idiosyncratic and highly individual secondary characters as well as real historical figures.   Absolutely to my taste.   I'm hooked on another series!